On the Return of the Bathroom Mirror Selfie

The students in my large intro-level online class this semester have just submitted their self-introductory posts, complete with a photograph of themselves. This isn't a photo of one of them--I protect my students' privacy! But this picture illustrates trend I can see, and it's interesting.

I have no idea who this person is! But they shared this public photo on Reddit to illustrate what a classic Millennial selfie looked like back circa 2010. We see a trifecta: the bathroom mirror selfie, a duckface expression, and the throwing up of a peace sign/victory sign.

My understanding is that the foundational element here is the bathroom mirror. Smartphones with cameras came out in the last years of the aughts (the original iPhone came out in 2007). Originally, there were no front-facing cameras. But the impulse to take selfies was huge among young people in possession of their first-ever camera, and so to see how they would look while taking a snapshot with their phone, they got in front of mirrors. Bathrooms have mirrors and bright lights, so a lot of early cellphone selfies wound up being taken there.

The duckface--pouting out the lips and sucking in the cheeks--had been a minor fad that spread on MySpace, then metastasized in the early years of the Cellphone Selfie Explosion. The V-sign/peace-sign posing fad was exported from Asian youth photos around the smartphone-possessing world, riding that same wave.

The thing with youth fads is that they pass. The youths in question move on and want to look more "professional," and the next generation of young people finds the former's fads cringe. When the first Gen Z students filled my classes, few would want to post a photo like this ironic and iconic Millennial example. Seeing the selfie of a person posed in a bathroom, especially a public one, and most especially if you could see a stall or toilet or urinal in it, would make them squeal in amused horror. Germs! Did these people have no class or self-respect? And duckface? Weird-looking! The V-handsign? Appropriative!

No, my college students of the mid-to-late 2010s--the first Gen Z college cohorts--preferred something very different: photofilters and composed, carefully-edited shots. Snapchat filters for fun with friends, hyperpolished and heavily edited selfportraits for Instagram. Facial and bodily proportions were tweaked, skin smoothed of all pores, and a frappuccino or miniature dog or car door became a prop to boost apparent status or "build a brand."

Some of my students in that era shared photos of themselves in class intro forums that barely looked human, they were so heavily edited. . .

Predictably, now late in the Gen Z college wave, we see a reaction to the era of high filtering. Today, the fad is for "authenticity." Students want to look like they are not using filters (though they often are; they're just not like the wild artificiality of FaceTune). They want to give the impression of having not put much effort into posing or props, but instead of spontaneity. They want to project low investment in how the selfie will be received, instead of advertising anxiety and a desire for control. They want to look casual and real and like they have ironic distance from social media, so it can't destroy them.

And how does this manifest? Well, I have witnessed the return of the bathroom selfie! So many bathroom mirror selfies taken with the rear camera lens--many of them in public bathrooms. In most, the photo very deliberately centers the cellphone itself, because this callback to awkward Millennials doing the same because they knew of no other option evokes authenticity. And for femme women, a sort of return of duckface, only moreso: the perfectly round pursed lip, like an ironic, exaggerated smooch.

Many of my new college students today repudiate the highly-filtered look because they retroactively see it as an early wave of AI-slopification. And so they reach back to the selfie practices of students of the Obama era. And I find that interesting, so I share my observation with you!